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In a Little-Known WWII Battle, a Father’s Experience Becomes a Daughter’s Journey

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In a Little-Known WWII Battle, a Father’s Experience Becomes a Daughter’s Journey

By Diantha Parker August 22, 2012 4:03 pmAugust 22, 2012 4:03 pm

DIEPPE, France — Going to the 70th anniversary commemoration of the Dieppe raid in Normandy this past weekend was part of a journey I began when I was very small. It gathered steam in college, when I first saw footage at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa that was shot at Dieppe by the Germans. I stood in a gallery watching it, looking for my father, Francis Stanley Parker, a private in the Black Watch Regiment of Canada, in the columns marching past the camera — an American in the sea of Canadian captives.

Video

Dieppe After the Battle

Graphic newsreel footage shot by German soldiers of the aftermath of the Dieppe Raid on August 22, 1942.

By Canadian War Museum on Publish Date August 22, 2014.
Photo by Canadian War Museum.

Today, as then, I fear spotting him, yet am also disappointed that I have yet to locate him in any footage or still photo I’ve seen that was taken that day. The Germans documented the aftermath meticulously, making sure that newsreel watchers would get a good look at the destroyed Allied tanks and landing craft, and especially the bodies on any one of the five beaches.

My father was a painter both before and after the war; in an interview we taped in 2001, a few years before he died, he described the bodies “sown thickly” — lying where they fell, chewed up by the tanks, reddening the breaking waves. Yet many Americans still do not know that the Dieppe raid even happened, or that — in all the celebration of the war’s outcomes — that there was ever a time that was this dark for the Allies.

For Americans to join up with foreign powers meant risking loss of citizenship and prison time. But it was not illegal for the Allied forces, desperate for able-bodied men, to take and even recruit Americans. And so on Aug. 19, 1942, my dad was one of many American volunteers in Canadian uniform who landed on the pebbly beaches of Dieppe in the not-early-enough morning hours. He was part of the 111-man “C” Company. The Black Watch Regiment was sent to Puys, code-named Blue Beach, east of Dieppe’s main harbor. The company’s mission was to support the 554 men of the Royal Regiment of Canada, who had landed about a half an hour earlier. They were met with steady machine-gun fire from German pillboxes. Killed in action were 207 members of the Royal Regiment, many before leaving their landing craft. Ron Beal, 91, a survivor of the Royal Regiment, said it all happened very fast.

Ron Beal Talks About Landing in Dieppe

Landing about 30 minutes after Mr. Beal did, my father said he and and several members of his company managed to take shelter in small caves at the base of the limestone cliffs as grenades, dropped by the Germans lining the cliff tops, exploded in the air above them.

Courtesy of Diantha ParkerFrank Parker, left, in 1941, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, before shipping out for England with the Black Watch. He is standing with his younger brother, John Jr., who was killed at Okinawa while serving with the United States Navy.

This week, I sat for a moment by those caves, and tried to imagine scaling the cliff above, as my father described one man’s effort to do so. The caves are crevasses taller than they are wide, like slits in a medieval fortress, and are, historians believe, one of the places he and about 62 other Black Watch members were taken prisoner.

Frank Parker on the Soldier Who Never Made the Hill

They were among the 1,950 soldiers at Dieppe who were crammed onto cattle cars for several days, without much food or water, headed to prison camps. My father and Mr. Beal eventually ended up in the same prison camp — Stalag VIII-B — in what was then Upper Silesia, and is now Lamsdorf, Germany. Mr. Beal does not remember my father, but their recollections of these hours at Puys are very similar. Both told me, and other prisoners have said on record, that their German captors asked them a version of the same question: this is too big for a raid, but too small for an invasion — what on earth were you trying to do? “And I said I didn’t know, as of course I didn’t,” my father recalled.

My father had personal reasons for joining. He had seen the occupation of France firsthand. He had dropped out of Harvard as a freshman and by 1937 had moved to Paris to paint and study painting, fleeing the city in the early summer of 1940. In the confusion, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit based near the town of Clermont-Ferrand, which is south of Paris. “I had only to present myself…the chaos was complete,” he recalled. “The roads were being bombed quite constantly. The civilians began to feel the casualties mounting and the panic, and general derangement, paralyzed the country.”

After eventually being forced out of occupied France, my father ended up in a prison in Spain for a month before getting out and onto a ship home from Portugal, thanks in part to relatives with State Department ties. Back in the United States, he made plans to return to Europe immediately, and saw the Canadian forces as the way to do it. “If I joined up with the Americans at that point, there was no telling when I would go,” he said. “I’d be sent to Texas or somewhere.” So he headed for Montreal and joined the Black Watch on Oct. 31, 1940.

By his own accounts, my dad was a conscientious soldier, and so far the documents I have seen from the Black Watch show no record of disobedience. He refused to be made an officer, a rank he was offered because of his education, saying he wanted to earn any promotion. But as an artist, he made an unusual private. An American friend from his prewar Paris days, Robert Wernick, now 94, reminded me in an e-mail of the time during training when my father’s commanding officer:

….commanded him to reconnoiter a hill. When he came to make his report, the officer asked, ‘What’s on top of the hill?” “A pink house, sir,” he answered. “Parker,” said the officer sharply, “in the Army, there is no such color as pink.”

My father enjoyed telling this story. He also saw the humor in many others from much darker periods of his war experience. But there is there little pink in this painting, called “Roll Call,” which my dad finished around 1967.

Courtesy of Diantha Parker“Roll Call” by Frank Parker.

I have always considered it a self-portrait, especially in the face and stance of the man fourth from right. But it’s really his portrait of “the days of wrath,” as he always referred to the war, which came out “wraahth” in his particularly old-fashioned Boston accent, and it came out often. My two older half-sisters were born much closer to the war, and grew up in its shade. As his third child and second family, I was born after his night terrors had mostly stopped, but his alcoholism, and spells of rage, and sudden tears, remained. Yet we loved him, and so did other people: he charmed with his stories and his courtly manner; his speech was sometimes peppered with French, which he spoke fluently; he often called women “my dear.” In prison camp, he spent months working on a giant feudal estate, in all seasons. As a result he had a very good command of 18th-century European farming techniques, and anyone who saw him outdoors realized this was work he actually enjoyed. He had no use for a weed whacker, for example: when I was in my teens, he taught me to use a scythe, which he used in combination with a gas mower to cut our grass.

So for years, I have thought of Dieppe itself as less a place than a cataclysm that led to other, more lasting experiences. But two incidents, both about 10 years ago, made me feel like Dieppe itself was haunting me.

On a visit to France in 2001, I was blissfully poking around a flea market in Orléans when I found a small, flat, ivory oval in a box of odds and ends. It slid open into a ladies’ pocket mirror, just big enough to discreetly check for lipsticked teeth. I’d decided to buy it until I turned it over, and recoiled: Dieppe, it read, engraved in faded red cursive, a between-the-wars seaside souvenir. I put it down and walked, possibly ran, away.

About a year later, I was waiting to board a delayed flight from Boston to Chicago. The gate was overfilled with noisy families returning from vacation, and an announcement asked for volunteers to give up their seats. I looked at my boarding pass, and then looked again, and felt like a tiny cold hand had closed around my wrist. The boarding pass read: Flight number: 1942 Date: August 19 Seat: 8B.

The flight number and date were bad enough, but Stalag VIII-B was my dad’s prison camp. Now freezing, I got up and headed toward the desk. I cannot get on this plane, I thought, but eventually I did, as no volunteers were needed, and we flew uneventfully to O’Hare as I shivered over this sign of … what, I had no idea. I wish now that I had kept the boarding pass, but like the mirror, I did not want it near me.

I thought of both incidents this week after having purposely booked a trip by both plane and ferry to come to this town and actually stand on the beach at Puys, which I think of as the scene of the crime. It is low tide and, far from the pebbles, swimmers are bodysurfing in gentle rollers on a broad, pale sandbar. I realize how small the beach would be at high tide, a stony postage stamp at the bottom of a winding narrowing road and surrounded by the limestone cliffs. A white house on a hill above the beach which looks down on all the gory photographs of that day, still stands — and from the road below you can see that the German bunker next to it, dark and hulking in the pictures, has been painted white to match and been made into a lovely terrasse, complete with chairs and navy umbrella.

Mathieu Willcocks for The New York TimesThe rocky beaches at Dieppe contributed to the failure of the Allies’ first amphibious attack on German-occupied France in 1941. Now, tanks have been replaced by tourists, many totally unaware of the battle fought there 70 years before.

I wept frequently while planning this trip, but Dieppe’s resorty pleasantness and embrace of its own complicated history is a relief, and there are other distractions. My French vocabulary, somewhat shaky, is full of the new words I’m hearing everywhere: blessé (wounded), anciens combattants (veterans), débarquement (landing). It’s bakingly hot on the day I visit Puys, with a group of Canadian colleagues, and I’m wearing the wrong shoes as I scramble over the pebbles to the cliffs, trying not to sprain an ankle.

Being here is moving and surreal, and I do choke up. But I also feel like having some of the ice cream being sold at the top of the sea wall the troops never scaled, though the line of bathing-suited French children and families is too long. I suspected that all this incongruity would make me feel much better about this place, and I’m right, but I’m frustrated that I can’t tell my father about these little details that both comfort and amuse me. That I can’t share that feeling, along with telling him about the enormity of coming here at all, makes me almost more sad.

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